Your character's starting attributes weren't a representation of their background or life choices, it was a representation of a race in the world. I'm trying to make it work in my mind, how a gnome, a halfling, a human, an orc, and a goliath are all going to have the same starting strength merely because they all spent a few years as stevedores. The dissonance in physical stats is more straightforward, but the mental stats too, most Orc's I've known have struggled to speak common if they even knew it, Orcish is a language without a lot of complex concepts, because the people who speak it aren't typically able to grasp them, It also doesn't have it's own script, a trait common among languages in illiterate cultures, so I'm guessing Orc culture for a while at least wasn't written, gosh the world building!. Yet any Orc player gets to start out speaking three languages.
If you're going to open up character creation to the panoply of races (not all of them well thought out), you've got to give me something, maybe -1 to a stat? Like all Orc characters have -1 Int, even if they can put +2 +1 anywhere they want, just something to remind me that Orcs are not the same as Dwarves.
